A group of Canada's leading public-interest oriented organizations and academic privacy experts - all members of Canada's privacy community - concerned about how technology and copyright laws are increasingly threatening to erode Canadians' privacy rights.

The Canadian Copyright Reform process

Thematic Working Group (WG) dealing with Patents,Copyrights,
Trademarks (P.C.T) and related issues, within the framework of the Civil
Society contribution to the World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS)
organized by the United Nations.

Copyright and Related Rights information from the World Intellectual
Property Organization. This site includes the WIPO Copyright Treaty
and the WIPO
Performances and Phonograms Treaty that is the source of the extremely
controversial interpretations of "Legal protection for Technological
Protection Measures" (such as in the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright
Act).

The International community is trying to get WIPO to modernize their
thinking so that they will discontinue diverging from their actual
mandate. Contrary to the views of some, the mandate is not to maximize
profits for those using outdated monopoly-rent-seeking business models.

The Opposing Copyright Extension Site, Maintained by, Dennis S.
Karjala, Professor of Law, Arizona State University, is a great place to
keep up on the world of Copyright Extension, the "Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act," and such legal matters.

(Russell McOrmond comments:) "This is a clear case of conflicting
laws, where the Russian law (which has a more balanced approach which
includes protection for Fair Use such as backup), is in conflict with the
very controversial (even in the USA) DMCA law. In this case, Sklyarov
claims his program is not only legal, but required under Russian law.
Will we get into a situation where Russia will be forced to arrest any
Adobe employee that sets foot in Russia for their illegal act of producing
software that attempts to circumvent fair use? Or worse, that the USA
will try to impose their unbalanced copyright laws onto Russia?"

Niels Ferguson, a professional cryptographer has written,
Censorship in action: why I don't publish my HDCP results,
which takes a look at why the DMCA is bad news. Note that he's not even a
citizen of the USA and yet their law is affecting his work!

Goals: to raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses, to
provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and
activists , to preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the
digital world, to collaborate with other digital rights and related
organisations, to nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from
grassroots activists to technical and legal experts

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is key to understanding the dynamic happening in Copyright between traditional industrial-era methods of production to modern network based methods of knowledge production and distribution.